In memory of Marina Vishmidt (1976-2024)

A key term we continuously come across in relation to Zionist colonial fascism and its ongoing genocidal campaign against Palestinian life in Gaza is that of “evil” — a term we hold both an affective attachment and theoretical ambivalence towards. As an exercise in thinking through the limits and potentialities of evil as a theological concept and legal framing that may guide us in contending with the unspeakable atrocities being perpetrated as we speak by the Zionist occupation in Gaza, we spoke with Alberto Toscano , whose latest book, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis (Verso Books, 2023) has proven invaluable in situating fascism within a racial-colonial continuum that persists in structuring our present.

Security Theology

Edwin Nasr (EN) and Lama El Khatib (LEK): Religious conjurings of evil have been innumerable since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinian life in Gaza and as a means to manufacture consent along the Euro-American axis. Consider Benjamin Netanyahu’s invocations of Jewish and Christian scriptures—from the doctrine of the Amalekites to the Essenes’ apocalyptic vision of the battle between the “children of light” and the “children of darkness”—and their inscription within the longue durée of the so-called global war on terror and the latter’s reliance on the rhetoric of good and evil, starting with George W. Bush’s notorious State of the Union Address from 2002. These Manichean binaries also find their resonance in a post-theological realm.For instance, Frédéric Lordon’s claim that “Israel established itself in ontological innocence,” allowing it to frame genocide as self-defense^[1]. And Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s concept of “security theology,” which, in fact, nests a double theology, that of a Biblical claim on the land of historic Palestine as well as that of a settler-colonial entity built through Palestinian elimination^[2]. What does this tell us about, on the one hand, the particular discursive workings of Zionist colonial fascism and, on the other, its comparability with other fascisms, both past and present?

Alberto Toscano (AT): What the Palestinian pastor Munther Isaac has anatomized, and anathematized, as a “theology of empire” – that symbiosis between the instrumentalization of the Old Testament and Jewish messianism for a project of racist dispossession, on the one hand, and the imperialist horizon of US Christian Zionism, on the other– can also be understood as the operation of “technicized myth.” This term, originating in the work of the Hungarian mythologist Károly Kerényi but anticipated in a political vein by Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, was directly applied to the case of Zionism by the Italian scholar of right-wing culture Furio Jesi in 1968. In the wake of the Israeli-Arab war of 1967, a number of Italian Jewish intellectuals associated with the liberal-socialist resistance against fascism and Nazism (including Primo Levi) had written, in the pages of the journal Resistenza: Giustizia e Libertà, pleas for solidarity with Israel at a moment of crisis. Jesi, writing as a dissenting voice, drew on Martin Buber and traditions of “cultural” and “spiritual” Zionism to denounce the propagandistic uses of theology to bolster a colonial project integrated into the broader designs of US imperialism, a project that for Jesi was openly carrying out what the Haggadah condemned as “the three sacrileges that can deprive the Jewish people of the rights to the land of Zion: the shedding of blood, idolatry, pride.”

Buber had written that for “political Zionism,” “the State is the goal and Zion a ‘myth’ that inflames the masses.” That Israeli propaganda employed to shore up nationalism, militarism, and settler-colonialism could leverage European guilt to “distort and exploit respectable religious beliefs to justify Israeli politics” undoubtedly put political Zionism for Jesi in a broader family of twentieth-century politics grounded in the technicization of myth, of which fascism was the crucial exemplar. Zionism’s instrumentalizations of theological texts definitely belong to the ambit of what Jesi termed “right-wing culture,” understood as one made up of authority, mythological security about the norms of knowing, teaching, commanding, and obeying,” in which “the past becomes a kind of processed mush that can be modeled and readied in the most useful way possible.” Yet we could also argue that this “technicization” of the Bible as a myth to legitimize, sacralize and guide settler-colonial dispossession and war for transfer, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, while a leitmotiv of the Israeli state and settler ideology is itself mutable.

Thus, we certainly see significant differences, say, between David Ben Gurion convening a governmental study group on the Book of Joshua in the early 1950s to ground a basically secular project of colonial state-building and dispossession, on the one hand, and the volatile synthesis of settler violence, authoritarian statism and religious fundamentalism which has led the Israeli government and state on a seemingly irreversible path of fascisation, on the other. In 1980, the student paper of Bar-Ilan University published a piece by Rabbi Israel Hass on “The Mitzvah of Genocide in the Torah,” in which he drew on Deuteronomy’s commandment to “obliterate the memory of Amalek” to justify the coming need for a war of annihilation against Palestinians, which would not spare even the children. At the time, he was dismissed by the university.

Now, Israeli government ministers voice similar views on a quotidian basis. For the likes of Bezalel Smotrich, repeating the Nakba is a duty, and its blueprint can be drawn from the Bible. As he declared: “When Joshua ben Nun [the biblical prophet] entered the land, he sent three messages to its inhabitants: those who want to accept [our rule] will accept; those who want to leave will leave; those who want to fight, will fight. The basis of his strategy was: We are here, we have come, this is ours. Now, too, three doors will be open, there is no fourth door. Those who want to leave – and there will be those who leave – I will help them. When they have no hope and no vision, they will go. As they did in 1948. […] Those who do not go will either accept the rule of the Jewish state, in which case they can remain, and as for those who do not, we will fight them and defeat them. […] Either I will shoot him, or I will jail him, or I will expel him.” Is there a clearer example of “technicized myth” and of the instrumentalization of Biblical text to shore up a racial-colonial order grounded in a logic and practice of elimination?

The Refusal to Compromise

EN and LEK: We can map out a far-reaching tradition among colonial, carceral, and fascist histories towards the use and abuse of evil as both a problem and paradigm. Have similar discourses on evil served abolitionist and anti-colonial struggle? Can evil, beyond its weaponization by fascism(s) or imperial conquests of the past, be rehabilitated as an emancipatory category by way of transitional justice?

AT: The language of evil has certainly had a mobilizing force in multiple theologies of liberation and galvanized social movements for emancipation, which at different junctures have been crisscrossed by messianic or millenarian utopias. Take this sermon from the radical reformer Thomas Müntzer, spiritual and political leader in the German Peasants’ War of the early sixteenth century: “What is the evil brew from which all usury, theft, and robbery springs but the assumption of our lords and princes that all creatures are their property? The fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the face of the earth – it all has to belong to them! … It is the lords themselves who make the poor man their enemy. If they refuse to do away with the causes of insurrection, how can trouble be avoided in the long run? If saying that makes me an inciter to insurrection, so be it!” The immediatism (as opposed to gradualism) that defined the anti-strategic strategy of radical abolitionism was deeply informed by a religious vocabulary in which talk of evil was prominent, feeding the sentiment – described by its opponents, be they plantocrats or reformist liberals, as fanatical – that the end of slavery was non-negotiable and that any dilution of it was to be repudiated, even sinful. The historian and essayist Lerone Bennett Jr. dramatized this in a piece on John Brown: “Always, everywhere, John Brown was preaching the primacy of the act. “Slavery is evil,” he said, “kill it.” “But we must study the problem . . .” Slavery is evil – kill it! “We will hold a conference . . .” Slavery is evil – kill it! “But our allies . . .” Slavery is evil – kill it!” If, as the late Joel Olson perspicuously put it, fanaticism – radical abolitionism included – can be defined as “the political mobilization of the refusal to compromise,” we can see how it might be drawn into evil’s semantic orbit, even when it has no overt truck with theology or religion. But, of course, the justice invoked by abolitionists and their kin is not transitional or transactional. Where a theological vocabulary shows its serious limits is in the movement from the irrevocable absoluteness of the principles, of the negation of injustice, to the delineation of what it might mean to construct and inhabit a just world, which is not going to descend readymade from on high.

EN and LEK: This refusal strikes in a similar vein to the words of assassinated Palestinian revolutionary Basil al-Araj, “the beginning of every revolution is an exit, an exit from the social order that power has enshrined in the name of law, stability, public interest, and the greater good^[3].” For al-Araj, the transition from outlaw to revolutionary is “smooth”—the immediateness of exit shakes the foundations upon which forces of domination justify and enshrine their systems in the name of a greater good and against the threat of a simultaneously gone and forthcoming evil.

AT: That is a powerful formulation, though I think we should not gainsay how much both movements of resistance and even revolutionary projects are to be grasped not just as the negation of a dominant order but as a creative assertion of alternative ethical or even legal dispensations. Historically, for instance, guerrilla movements, to be successful, have had to combine some degree of attentive respect for popular or peasant normativity with their own effort to constitute a new order. Nazis called resistance fighters in World War II “bandits” – but as the historian Claudio Pavone has wonderfully shown in his work on Italy’s “civil war,” resistance bands had to engage in the formidable work of defining and practicing, in the zones precariously liberated from fascist sovereignty, their own radically antagonistic laws, stability, public interest, and greater good. And these, while emerging in a juridical vacuum – in the absence of constituted authorities – were not ex nihilo, but depended on creatively combining customary communal practices with imaginaries of revolutionary renovation. The exit or caesura is crucial, but we should be wary of thinking of it as a tabula rasa or as a pure negation.

Evil as Enjoyment

EN and LEK: Hannah Arendt’s phrasing of “the banality of evil” has witnessed significant engagement among proponents and allies of the Palestinian struggle for decolonization. One might even argue it has, in certain instances, been entirely repurposed from its original interpretation—which in itself somehow remains contested—to speak for more generalized forms of indifference and desensitization towards genocidal warfare and the unbearable imagery the latter produces. Arendt herself was rather more concerned with how agents of an eliminationist order participate in and experience decision-making processes about the maintenance of a well-oiled, industrial-scale death machine (“the facts of administrative massacre”). Recent reporting on Lavender, an AI targeting system “with little human oversight” being deployed by Zionist occupation forces in their bombing of Gaza, has triggered an ongoing debate about both the legal and ethical implications of such framings on genocidal perpetration. There are two rather distinct questions nested in this. The first is how present-day anxieties and fixations on individual responsibility in the face of mass atrocities have come to alter and refigure this notion of “banality of evil” and what that might reveal about political agency in our present moment. The second would have more to do with whether framing perceivably evil acts as being mediated through administrative or technological rationality might not abstract genocidal violence in and of itself, as well as the mechanisms of its perpetration.

AT: I think that the emphasis on the centrality of bureaucratic technologies, anonymity, and logistics – while a dimension of the Nazi’s extermination of European Jewry and of genocidal violence in other contexts, Palestine included – is in many ways misplaced and misleading. It belongs to a narrative of modernity as alienation, desensitization, and impersonality, which leaves us none the wiser about the massive degrees of participation, enjoyment, and freedom that characterize phenomena of exterminatory violence. Personally, I am far more disturbed by the children of fascist settlers being indoctrinated into joyously destroying convoys of humanitarian aid directed toward the besieged and starving people of Gaza than I am by the fact that the IDF has come up with a target-generating program for a bombing campaign that makes a grotesque mockery of principles of discrimination, proportionality or what have you. Indeed, I think the Israelis have long fed a kind of technological fetishism in their admirers (and lucrative clients) as well as in their adversaries, which we would do well to suspend and criticize. Historians of Nazi Germany have long dismantled the common sense about the impersonal machinery of extermination, making us aware of the high degrees of subjective participation, initiative, reflexivity, and commitment generated by the politics of mass murder. Putting aside any facile and futile analogies, I think there is a lesson in method there for those wishing to reflect on what prominent Israeli politicians are broadcasting as “Nakba 2.0.” I am not suggesting that we avert our eyes from the technologies of political and racial violence but that we exercise vigilance about the reproduction of twentieth-century social theories and ideologies that treat genocide as a byproduct of technological rationality – this results in the kind of depoliticizing metaphysical framing of political violence that infamously led the German philosopher and erstwhile NSDAP-member Martin Heidegger to declare in 1949: “Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry – in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.” Genocide is not the product of machinic impersonality but is brimming with agency, responsibility, and, alas, enjoyment (we didn’t need IDF TikTok videos to find this out, but they certainly raise our awareness to a sickening pitch).

EN and LK: This opens up questions around perpetrator societies and the limitations of legal processes—but also around the representability of perpetration at such a scale. Gillian Rose, in her essay on aesthetic representations of the Holocaust, writes: “If fascism is the triumph of civil society, the triumph of enraged particular interests, then the subject of representation does not need to be superseded: the danger of its experience needs to be exposed. And the same danger will be the means of exposition. Otherwise, we remain at a beginning of the day”.

AT: I am sympathetic to Rose’s entreaty that we do not allow our representations of fascism to push us in the direction of a supposedly ethical or redemptive exit from representation altogether, though I am wary, in her talk of a “fascism of representation,” of treating it as a fundamentally intra-philosophical question, such that fascism would be primarily a potential and a pitfall of Western Reason as such, calling for the reflexive vigilance of critique rather than an antagonistic politics and theory of crisis. I think that Rose’s identification of a hypertrophy of civil society – and the interlocking of “social libertarianism with political authoritarianism” – as a seedbed of fascism, and especially her formula that fascism marks the monopolization and “unleashing of the non-legitimate violence of individualized civil society” does however provide a promising analytic framework. That said, in explicitly delinking fascism from questions of imperialism, Orientalism, and class in the closing pages of her chapter, I think she misses the profound and complex entanglements of fascist subjectivities and individualisms – especially those of a petty sovereign straddling the border or frontier between legitimate and non-legitimate – with the history and structure of colonial racial capitalism.

Eradicating Evil

EN and LEK: We have come to understand how the figure of the Palestinian within Zionist thought is constructed both through the latter’s settler-colonial disposition (the Palestinian as an eradicable Native) and European colonialism’s race-making modalities (the Palestinian as backward, inferior). How, then, does the figure of the Palestinian come to occupy such a central locus within the broader Euro-American imaginary—Darryl Li recently reminded us that some of the first anti-terrorist laws in the US were drafted against Palestine solidarity activism in the 1960s—and which present-day anxieties does this centering expose ^[4]? Islam al-Khatib, in a recent Verso Books blog entry, writes: “Now, more than ever, Palestinian agency is being viewed as a threat because those who refuse to capitulate could very well revolutionize the world once again^[5].”

AT: I think it is incontrovertible that Palestinian resistance, especially the material and symbolic forms it took from the late 1960s as a form of internationalized armed struggle, overlapping with the far-left urban guerrillas in Western Europe, played a critical role in shaping the practices and the imaginary of counter-insurgency. While the memories and aftershocks of that earlier period have not entirely faded, I don’t think that there is now a figure of the Palestinian (be it revolutionary, terrorist, or victim) that operates in the Euro-American imaginary in a comparable way. On one side, you have the inane, and I don’t think particularly successful efforts to equate Hamas and ISIS, say, by the likes of Netanyahu, the ludicrous Gilad Erdan (Israel’s ambassador to the UN), or the more rabid US Christian Zionists. On the other, support for Palestinians’ right to resist colonization and elimination by force of arms, even when it finds utterance, rarely involves the kind of identification, or the iconic register (think Leila Khaled), of that earlier moment. There is certainly a reluctance or refusal to think of Palestinian political or military agency in the mainstream that sometimes borders on the pathological, but I am not sure this represents something fundamentally new – rather, we see an intensification of that racial regime that you alluded to which combines a horizon of eradicability and disposability with projections of savagery and underdevelopment. The shock of October 7 in terms of the implosion of Israel’s self- and global image grounded in technological hyper-development and strategic invincibility, together with the undoing of the idea that the question of Palestine had been indefinitely deferred if not irrevocably closed – this could only be disavowed or dispelled by presenting Al-Aqsa Flood solely through the lens of unexampled barbarity (with Biden confirming having seen non-existent photos of beheaded Israeli babies, and so on). That is a powerful quote with which you end your question, though I wonder about the wisdom of burdening Palestinians with the epochal role of heralds or subjects of revolutionary change.

The Temporality of Evil

EN and LEK: This brings us to the crux of post-1989 rights discourses that extend into—if not build the very foundations of—the juridico-political infrastructures of today. As Robert Meister noted, “The past was evil because evil is past.^[6]” The dogmas of late capitalism appear to insist on two temporal regimes of evil that maintain a neoliberal logic: one that exists in the posterity of evil and the other cautiously fabricated around a so-called evil to come. To normalize the extraction of value, resources, labor, and bodies enacted through historical colonialism, slavery, and genocide, evil must necessarily be a thing of the past, a series of events whose overcoming marks the institution of today’s statehood and legislative grounds. But evil must also remain a future potential—the prevention of evil continues to be a motto under which liberalism ensures order by way of neocolonial expansions, counter-revolutionary policing, and genocidal warfare. This past and future of evil guides the logic of liberal democracy, while fascism appears to be defined by the presence of evil — a time contemporaneous with evil abound. How do you see these seemingly distinct time registers operating simultaneously, and what can that point to vis-a-vis the entwinement of fascism and neoliberal rule?

AT: One of the mechanisms that govern the reproduction of our liberal common sense is that of discursively and spectacularly transforming structures into events, durable if mutable apparatuses, and sedimented histories of violence into sublime and monumental singularities. This is one of the dynamics that allows the “never again” to become an alibi for “again.” In the throes of the repressive reaction against the liberation movements of the sixties and seventies, Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis sought to redefine incipient fascism as a theory and practice of preventive counter-revolution. This was a modality of fascism incubated within and fostered by hegemonic liberalism built on the racial regimes of settler colonialism and anti-Black oppression. A “progressive” liberalism, or neo-liberalism, advertises itself as the guarantor of a virtuous historical arc, “bending toward justice” and away from past evils; yet it is practically enmeshed with defenses of the order of capital that are nourished, both affectively and tactically, by those past evils themselves, remixed and recombined for present expediency. Beneath the antithesis of liberalism and fascism, we find a historical and structuring affinity in their dependence on what the French philosopher Étienne Balibar usefully named preventive counter-violence – meaning that the legitimation but also the inherent temporality of the violence of domination is determined as a pre-emptive self-defense against the threat posed by the dominated, the foreign, the different. In conjunctures of crisis, with all the intermundia and interregna they bring to the fore, the quotidian labor of counter-insurgency that shadows liberal rule comes to be front-staged, becoming a potential terrain of affirmation, investment, and intensification by those forces persuaded that threats to order, privilege or value are not to be managed but extirpated. One of the ways in which we may wish to approach fascism is as the effort to affirm and celebrate the “dark side” of liberalism, against and beyond liberalism (let’s not forget how crucial this leitmotiv was to neo-conservatism and the “war on terror,” which delighted in scenarios à la 24, where threats to liberalism had to be met with exceptional and unchecked cruelty). From justifications of carceral confinement to Cold War apologias for supporting torture states, much actually-existing liberalism has depended on a kind of tactical, temporary, or transitional application of fascist fixes or creation of “sacrifice zones” for fascist practices, to “make the world safe” for the democracy of property. In this sense, too, we can heed Karl Polanyi’s warning (one of the epigrams for my book): “The problem of fascism is as old as capitalism. The threat was there from the start.” It is striking that one of the refrains levied at liberalism by conservatives and fascists alike is that it has forgotten evil, that it has retreated from the recognition of a fundamental enmity structuring politics at a world scale, and from the moral underpinning of such enmity. It is also worth observing how much right-wing culture depends on the projection of evil, even or especially in the absence of any organized and imminent danger – just think of all the contemporary fabulations about a coming communist insurrection that animate the rhetoric of reaction.

The Time of Return

EN and LEK: It seems that fascism (by way of liberalism) relies on both a transformation of structure into an event and, at the same time, a capitulation and redirection of a past that emerges as a surplus of affects, memories, desires, and wishes. What, then, are the forms of resistance to fascism? If the shared past is precious, as we recall with Cedric Robinson’s words, “not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness, of knowing, of being,” how does an anti-fascism re-orient the past against its capture in the present and future? In a text published in Parapraxis earlier this year, Adam HajYahia offers a reading (in close dialogue with your Late Fascism) of Palestinian return as a counter-movement to the return of fascism ^[7]. Understanding Palestinian return in an expanded and indeterminate sense — the recurring acts of making a future possible in the present — HajYahia outlines it as a return of the repressed, which functions not as a reversal of the past but as a return “from the present to a different present” or “a redeeming principle that pursues the abolition of the conditions that render exile the only remaining possibility.”

AT: I think perhaps more than the transformation of a structure into an event, processes of fascization today (including in Israel) imply a subjectivation of histories and structures of violence and domination, which liberalism relied upon but disavowed. As I’ve already suggested, fascism is, inter alia, an affirmation, and enjoyment of the “dark side” of liberalism, of its repressive conditions of possibility–be these dispossession, racialization, bordering, carcerality, policing, elimination, etc. As for the question of an anti-fascist politics of time, I agree that HajYahia’s delineation of two radically opposed valences of “return” is very compelling and opens up new ways of thinking about the antagonism between, on the one hand, right-wing culture’s instrumentalization of the past as a “processed mush” (Jesi) that can fuel projects of domination and, on the other, the radical tradition, the passing on and revivifying of the resources of resistance, that Robinson evokes. I also appreciated HajYahia’s foregrounding of the dimension of creative abolition involved in forging a ”different present” because it distances us from the sense of the past as a transmitted substance, a bequeathed possession. We can heed here the words of the poet and Resistance maquisard René Char, when he declaimed that "our inheritance was left to us by no testament" (Notre héritage n'est précédé d'aucun testament) – meaning that the time made by anti-fascist struggle is a time without guarantees. To the extent that fascism (in an expanded sense that incorporates modalities of colonial racial capitalist violence) is born of and borne by crisis, it also feeds on the disordering and the unevenness of historical time, the upending of temporal orientation, and especially of narratives and imaginaries of progress. Today, when his claim that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins” is painfully actual, there is still much to be gained from meditating on Walter Benjamin’s contention that the unsparing critique of temporal frameworks based on linear progress and “empty time” such as might inform the expectations of liberalism or social democracy– is an indispensable dimension of the fight against fascism and the articulation of a “tradition of the oppressed.” The lived past of subaltern struggles for emancipation that demand to be de-sedimented and reactivated is here juxtaposed to the archaic past, the technicized myths of the fascist Right, which are ultimately wedded to the ravages of capitalist time. One of the difficulties we find ourselves in is to revive conceptions of revolutionary time–a time that also transforms “tradition” itself, as Fanon observed in the context of Algerian decolonization–while disjoining them from superficially comforting if increasingly obsolete imaginaries of progress.

EN and LEK: This also reminds us of Patrick Wolfe, who, in Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (1999) and Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (2016), warns us that settler-colonial structures appear as events in order to conceal the “continuing operations of the logic of elimination.”

AT: We may wish to supplement Wolfe’s formula today by observing that the anxious solidarity with Israel shown by the elites and sizable portions of public opinion of other settler colonies (US, Canada, Australia) is colored by how the events that perpetuate that structure– the visible, spectacular, horrifying acts of dispossession and elimination– disturb those settler orders that envisage their colonial events as simply past (and thus open to inquiries about “truth”), and their colonial structures as open to meliorative correction or repair (“reconciliation”). The short-circuiting of the liberal logic and temporality of settler-colonial liberalism has been one of the byproducts of agitation around the war (in slogans like “From Salish Seas to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime,” etc.).

1. Lordon, Frédéric. “The End of Innocence.” Sidecar April 12, 2024.
2. Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera. Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015.
3. Al-Araj Basil. “Exiting Law and Entering Revolution.” trans. Bassem Saad, The Bad Side.
4. “How the ADL’S Anti-Palestinian Advocacy Helped Shape U.S. Terror Laws,” The Intercept.
5. “Becoming Monsters: What Happens When the Witness Becomes the Defendant.” Verso.
6. Sociality. “Interview with Robert Meister.” Historical Materialism, 31 Jan. 2023, .
7. HajYahia, Adam. “The Principle of Return.” Parapraxis, 8 Apr. 2024.